Our awards

Ecostorm has won or been nominated for a number of major awards in recent years, including some of the most prestigious in the industry:

WINNER Harold Wincott Award for Television Journalism of the Year (2015) for our undercover investigations with Channel 4 News into working and living conditions for migrants in UK fruit packing factories and Spanish salad farms. The four part investigation prompted the judges to comment: “Channel 4 News took on a story about labour conditions in the supermarket fruit and vegetable packing supply chain, where an undercover reporter worked with Siobhan Kennedy to lay out a charge sheet of appalling working conditions which resulted in an immediate response from the supermarkets involved.”

WINNER Royal Television Society (RTS)independent award (2015) for a joint film with Channel 4 News about the world of Bucharest’s homeless underground society. The film exposed the desperate lives of hundreds of men, women and children living in squalid conditions in a network of tunnels and sewers under the Romanian capital Bucharest. In shocking scenes, the tunnel-dwellers are seen injecting drugs and inhaling paint fumes. Most of the people in the tunnels have HIV and a quarter have TB. The film also won an Amnesty media prizein the TV news category.

WINNER Derek Cooper Award for Investigative & Campaigning Food Journalism (2015). Ecostorm’s joint investigation with The Guardian into hygiene failures in the UK poultry sector won the 2015 Derek Cooper Award at the guild of Food Writers annual award ceremony. The investigation, using undercover footage, photographic evidence and information from whistleblowers revealed how strict industry hygiene standards to prevent the contamination of chicken with the potentially deadly campylobacter bug can be flouted on the factory floor and on farms.

SHORTLISTED Investigative & Campaigning Food Journalism (2016). Ecostorm’s major 18-month investigation and film with The Guardian into how antibiotic use on intensive pig farms led to a variation of the superbug MRSA contaminating supermarket pork was shortlisted for the 2016 Guild of Food Writers “Investigative and Campaigning” award.